Ok, so a theme munged from an old Beck song has absolutely nothing to do with roguelikes. Really though, this month seems to be all about new releases of roguelikes, lots of ’em, and you’re a loser, baby, who should kill himself if you aren’t just a little bit excited about it. Yep, that’s my tie-in.

Hope you have some time to waste and are also nerdy enough to like this sort of thing. If not, go play some Mass Effect or something. Go on, git.

Yo, bring it on down.

Here’s a quick list of the big names updating this month:

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.6

DoomRL 0.9.9.1

Transcendence 1.0

Also recently, a rash of newcomers, mostly one-off concept games made in the heat of friendly competition:

Tigsource’s Assemblee Competition

7DRL (7 day roguelike competition)

Forces of evil in a bozo nightmare. (Crawl)

If I'd made it further in the dungeon than five levels, I'd have a better screenshot.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup‘s last release, 0.5, was a landmark that provided great interface refinements and one of the most flexible and thoughtful tiled interfaces around. The 0.6 release looks somewhat less dramatic an improvement, but still offers some exciting features: a finalized version of the Shoals dungeon branch, several new gods to extract favor from, and “Dungeon Sprint,” a super hard, super condensed hack designed as a one-off challenge for experienced players.

Stock car flamin’ with a loser on the cruise control. (Transcendence)

Darkness and disease, wrapped in danger, and so forth.

Transcendence splits the difference between arcade space shoot-em-ups and roguelike complexity, and it may well suffer a little popularity hit because of this. Too quiet for a shooter, not ponderous enough for a roguelike, Transcendence is a game about exploration, trading, and upgrading your ship, with an arcade space shooter mechanic. It owes as much to Elite as it does to Nethack or Asteroids.

The big news for this release is that after many long years of on again, off again development, Transcendence has finally hit the big one-oh. It may even have a proper endgame by now. Congratulations, George Moromisato!

Double barrel buckshot. (DoomRL)

Here are the tiles you won't be seeing in the newest revision of DoomRL.

Speaking of splitting things (in half, with shotgun blasts), DoomRLsaw a new release just this past week. Unfortunately, the fantastic new tileset by Derek Yu is not one of them. On the other hand, there are several new features and surprises for experienced players, as well as bug fixes and interface refinements for everyone else. “Exotic” weapons have been newly classified and made more frequent, and the ability to record demos and a prototype modding tool has been added.

7DRL, or 7-Day Roguelike, is a strict competition focused on producing a full roguelike within a single week, from start to finish. Done in eight days? Sorry, that’s an 8DRL. The most recent compo just ended March 14th, and I’ve yet to play any of them, however, given the short timespan, it’s likely that even the best of these are going to be novel one-offs or proofs-of-concept.

Still, it’s an even bet that at least some of the new game mechanics that come about in a rapid prototyping environment will show up in other games. At the very least, 7DRL is a fertile playground for new ideas.

4 thoughts on “In a Time of Roguelike Chimpanzees I was a Monkey”

Hey doc,
a couple of days ago I opened up a subforum dedicated to roguelike games with a sci-fi theme over at strangebedfellows.de. Thought that might interest you.
Thanks again for the crawl launcher and have a good time.